Stagnation
by Dame March Dolcetto
Summary: (spoilers for the manga) "If the soul dies, the body will become an empty shell even though it's physically alive." The more years pass, the less he feels like himself. Snapshots over the years.


**I drabble in things when I have a block. Now I've cobbled a bunch together in the faint semblance of a story. Romance is... not something I'm confident writing about but I like how this turned out. As a heads-up I headcanon that Elizabeths are all named either Elizabeth or some variant of that name, and not just nicknames. That said... enjoy!**

* * *

He is Meliodas, the heir apparent of the Demon clan. As such, there is not much that he does not know about the ongoings of the Demon Realm and its inhabitants. So, of course, he knows about Gelda and of how Zeldris was courting her.

What he doesn't know is _why._

As long as it didn't interfere with his duties, he was willing to let Zeldris have his fun but he personally cannot understand it in the _slightest. _It seemed like such a burden, really. They already have to work to keep their emotions in control as it is so why in the world was his ever-dutiful, ever-responsible brother letting himself feel so strongly for another, much less a being as insignificant as a vampire, of all things? He doesn't get it in the _slightest._

He really could not care less, so long as his brother made sure his little dalliances never interfered with his duties, but he does have to wonder why his soft-hearted fool of a brother allowed the distraction.

That all changes once he meets Elizabeth.

* * *

_This _was how it felt to live, this pounding in his chest, this chaos in his hearts. He sees her and he feels an ache like his hearts are about to burst. He hurts, he aches, he laughs, he _loves, _and he feels like finally, _finally_, he's started to _live_ and that he would fight and die any number of times to ensure that he would never return to that forsaken, unfeeling, _unthinking_ state ever again.

Because _this _was what it was like to live and he never wants to let go of it, of his feelings, of his friends, of loving and being loved, of _Elizabeth_.

As long as he lives, he swears he will never forget it.

* * *

**"As long as you live, eh?"**

His father laughs.

**"We'll see about that."**

* * *

He lives and keeps living, no matter what. She dies and keeps dying, no matter what. Such is the nature of their curse,

In a strange twist of events, once, in one of Elizabeth's lifetimes, one where she was called Elise, they first meet as he is the one dying.

It was in the midst of a violent, virulent period of Britannia's history, during a lull in the fighting between two kingdoms in which he'd had no interest in taking part. An illness he was at least half-sure was made as a curse by one side's mages had spread all throughout the land, obliterating both the lands and the people within them. In all honesty, he's just surprised he's even _able_ to get infected after all this time.

The fever, the vomiting, the bloody _shitting_... well, it wasn't all it was cracked up to be, being sick

He meets her as she's trying to treat him, as she was all of the others. She was the sole cleric of the town remaining after the initial wave spread through the populace and the one still helping after most of its inhabitants had become afflicted.

"Don't you die," he can vaguely remember through a haze of heat and blurring vision, her incarnation's black bun going askew as she worked feverishly to force what he knew by then would be ineffectual healing herbs down his throat. Her blue eyes were teary but resolute. "Don't you dare die, I won't be able to stand it if you die, Meliodas, I won't let you!"

He hadn't told her his name in this lifetime. He'd first met her with his throat already closed from the disease, when a stranger found him collapsed on the side of the road and brought him in to be cured.

He opens his eyes just in time to see a wave of shining healing magic bursting outward from her body, the blue of her left eye _exploding_ into a vivid amber, the triskelion, the symbol of the Goddess clan, suddenly bright in her eye.

Her light sears his vision, leaves him blinded. Because he's fucking _weak_ in all the ways it counts, he falls unconscious before he can fully process what exactly just happened.

When he wakes up two days later, it's without pain.

He wakes up just in time to see her lips forming the words "_I love you"_ and _"I'm sorry"_. She is laying on the bed beside his, eyes fever-bright, face soaked in sweat, and her veins dark with corruption. He, along with everyone else, had been cured, and she was dying.

She was dying.

He'd never even gotten to say hello. They'd only just met.

And she was dying.

It was all his fault.

_"Don't blame yourself,"_ she mouths. She could not speak, her throat was closed as his had been, but she already knew him, wanted to comfort him. There were tears in her eyes but she looked satisfied. Her face was bone-pale, eyes bloodshot and thickly-crusted with rheum, skin stretched taut over the hollows of her skull. Yet, to his eyes, she never has and never will look anything less than radiant. _"I love you."_

He clasps her hand. Presses a kiss to the cusp of her wrist. He whispers the words back and it makes her lips curve up in what would've been a smile if it weren't for her skeletal face, her deathly pallor. He keeps holding on. It's all he can do.

She dies in his arms three hours later.

* * *

When he tries to follow her—

**"Hello, son," **his father booms. **"What a delight to see you again."**

He feels numb when he wakes.

* * *

She introduces herself as Alyzabeth, this incarnation of Elizabeth. Every time he looks at her, he feels something like a jolt. From her face to her hair, to her brilliant blue eyes, she is a near-exact replica of her first incarnation. If it weren't for how she always kept her silver hair in a braid to one side, she would've looked exactly the same as before. They always look alike, of course, always carry a trace of the Elizabeth who was a goddess, but it's _rare_ for the similarity to be quite so blatant.

He first meets her when she is sixteen years old. She is a Druid, an Apostle of the Goddesses, the pride of her clan. Both of her eyes are a clear, unmarked blue. When he'd first seen her, she'd been aglow in healing light, and he'd almost called out in spite of himself. When she'd seen him, she'd smiled, and it was so like those beautiful days of before that he'd become frozen, transfixed.

She says he feels familiar. He wishes he didn't.

But she doesn't remember anything else. He feels familiar to her but that's _it. _She doesn't remember a thing in the weeks that followed, nor the months. She doesn't remember anything, not even when she reads the history of their clans, prays at the shrines of the goddesses that, in her first lifetime, had been her brethren, or even when she meets Merlin. She doesn't remember a thing and never does in all the days they spend together in the sun.

When he steals her away from the Druid clan in the dead of night, the two of them laughing as they flew together under the moonlight, then _living _together as they'd never had the chance to, he thinks, that maybe, just maybe, this was the lifetime where their struggles could finally end and they could simply _be _together. He knows he does not deserve her but if he could dedicate his life and all the years he has into making her the happiest person in the world, he would be more than happy to die for the chance. To create a whole new life together with Alyzabeth (_Elizabeth)._

Then, one morning after a year spent together, a morning like any other, she wakes up with one eye golden, the other blue, both marked with triskelions in silver. She tells him she remembers. She had a dream that night. She remembers everything. She says she's sorry.

It was such a happy dream, too.

Merlin casts _Perfect Cube. _The room they're in is empty of anything that could bring anyone harm (except himself). He stays with her all throughout the three days. He _knows_ what she's thinking but she never once tries to discourage him from his plans and he has to _try,_ fate damn it all.

Her heart stops while she's in his arms. She dies, the words "I-love-you" halfway through her mouth. Nothing had happened, nothing at all. Her heart had simply, inexorably, _stopped beating._

At least it's quiet, this time. That's the last thing he thinks before the grief overwhelms him and he has to scream.

* * *

He knows he shouldn't and yet—

It was just too much, he couldn't—

**"Hello, again, my son," **his father says. He was smiling. **"Welcome back."**

He can't even regret it when he wakes.

* * *

It's crazy, it's _incredible_, but years have passed since he's met Elizabeth, _Liz_, and she's shown no sign of remembering, no sign of any latent, holy power.

Yet she loves him anyway.

For the first time in what felt like a hundred years... he feels hope that she might _live. _He almost doesn't want to but he thinks, he feels, he _hopes _that she might live

Then she is killed without even remembering and that hope dies in ashes and smoke.

* * *

After the initial, _vicious_ outburst, the rage, the indignation, the screaming _grief_, he doesn't cry for Liz.

(At least, not until much, _much_ later)

Because in the aftermath of his tantrum, he finds an infant in the ruins of Danafor. A newborn, covered in the dried gunk of her afterbirth. The fuzz on her head shone silver. Her eyes were a painfully familiar shade of blue.

"Hello, Elizabeth," he manages, a choked exhale, face still streaked with tears, grief still heavy in his chest even now, after all these lifetimes. "It's good to see you again."

He wraps her in swaddling clothes and carries her out, away from the corpse of this newest incarnation's mother, from the corpse of her previous incarnation. It's all he can do for her.

* * *

The moment he figures out what his "trial" is supposed to be, he kind of wants to laugh. (As horrible as everything is)

At least he doesn't have much more to lose.

* * *

He can't feel _much_, not in the bright, vivid, jagged ways he remembers from years and years ago, before his deaths, before _Elizabeth_'s deaths, from Liz's to the very first's.

But.

He can still _feel._

Only a little.

Not much.

But then, it was more than _nothing_.

He takes every emotion he can feel, what little he can, and embraces it, from joy to sorrow and everything in between.

He will never abandon them, not for as long as he can live, because it's the only thing worth living for

Even when he hurts

Even when he _grieves_

He will never want to lose it, how it feels to _feel_

Even while his father takes and takes at his happiness, tries and tries to leave him with nothing but pain and sorrow—

He would refuse to reject even that. Because that was what Elizabeth showed him. And no matter what, he will never lose the hope that she might someday _live, _free of the curse that bound her

Because it was just so gods-damned _unfair._

That was why it was so unacceptable.

That was why it was so _unforgivable._

That was why he was never going to let it happen again, no matter what!

—He gains control over his powers not through rejection, but through acceptance.

* * *

Until.

He was trapped, Melascula was out there, and Elizabeth—

Elizabethwasindanger_Elizabethwasindanger**Elizabethwasindanger**_

Then nothing.

* * *

He knows why he's here, he knows what his past-self had meant to do. And he'll do it. Out of respect for his conviction as much as anything else, he'll do it. Though, it really doesn't change the fact that he really doesn't understand _why _he'd wanted to do such a thing.

He has memories of the events as they happened, of all the lifetimes they'd shared, but he really cannot comprehend why exactly he's been so damned determined to do as he did. He will still do it, of course.

But he doesn't understand it in the _slightest._

_end_

* * *

**Well, I hope this was... enjoyed, for lack of a better word. This was kind of an experiment so any feedback, positive or negative, would be greatly appreciated.**

**That said, thanks for reading and please have a nice day.**


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